Kevin Bankston

Kevin Bankston is the Policy Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, where he works in the public interest to promote a stronger and more open Internet for a stronger and more open society, with a focus on issues of Internet surveillance and censorship. Prior to leading OTI’s policy team, Kevin was a Senior Counsel and the Director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting democratic values, constitutional liberties and human riights in the digital age. Before that, he worked for nearly a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, specializing in free expression and privacy law with a focus on government surveillance, and litigated Internet free expression issues as a William J. Brennan First Amendment Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. He graduated from the University of Southern California Law Center and the University of Texas at Austin, was previously a nonresidential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society, and is now a Truman National Security Fellow, a board member of the First Amendment Coalition, and on the advisory board of the Open Technology Fund.